Theseus

Boos, Kevin; Lin, Zhouchen

doi:10.1145/3144555.3144560

Cited by 11 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…The dynamic linker is uniquely positioned to provide a runner abstraction on top of existing kernels, such as Linux, by transforming the Unix environment provided by the kernel prior to program execution. For instance, loading a JavaScript or WebAssembly [43] program would configure the language virtual machine transparently, while a Sing# [21] program would be loaded into an existing Singularity runner as a software isolated process [11,27].…”

Section: Customized Runnersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dynamic Linkers Are the Narrow Waist of Operating Systems

Castes,

Ghosn

2023

Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

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While software applications, programming languages, and hardware have changed, operating systems have not. Widelyused commodity operating systems are still modelled after the ones designed in the seventies. The accumulated burden of backward compatibility with the large software ecosystems that run our workloads prevents systems from embracing more efficient and disruptive designs explored by the system research community.This paper advocates a fresh approach to operating system research, where innovations are incrementally integrated into operating systems, without disrupting existing software, to gradually reshape our daily-use systems. The dynamic linker emerges as a pivotal element in this transformation process, redefining system behavior. The paper outlines specific use cases, covering performance enhancements, strengthened security measures, streamlined software deployment, and enriched programming language abstractions. Additionally, the paper introduces Spidl, an experimental modular dynamic linker to facilitate the exploration of this promising new research avenue.CCS Concepts • Software and its engineering → Abstraction, modeling and modularity; Runtime environments.

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Section: Customized Runnersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 2000, Rob Pike argued that "systems software research is irrelevant", and that it has become "a sideline to the excitement in the computing industry" [38]. Indeed, despite prolific results from the research community [9,11,18,27,35,40,43] there has been very little impact on industrial operating systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic Linkers Are the Narrow Waist of Operating Systems

Castes,

Ghosn

2023

Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems

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“…The concept of ownership ensures that all objects are safely handled with minimal runtime overhead. Thanks to Rust's memory safety and high performance, operating systems like RustyHermit [24], Theseus [5], TockOS [27] and Redox [14] were written in Rust.…”

Section: Rustmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intra-unikernel isolation with Intel memory protection keys

Sung

Olivier

Lankes

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

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Unikernels are minimal, single-purpose virtual machines. This new operating system model promises numerous benefits within many application domains in terms of lightweightness, performance, and security. Although the isolation between unikernels is generally recognized as strong, there is no isolation within a unikernel itself. This is due to the use of a single, unprotected address space, a basic principle of unikernels that provide their lightweightness and performance benefits. In this paper, we propose a new design that brings memory isolation inside a unikernel instance while keeping a single address space. We leverage Intel's Memory Protection Key to do so without impacting the lightweightness and performance benefits of unikernels. We implement our isolation scheme within an existing unikernel written in Rust and use it to provide isolation between trusted and untrusted components: we isolate (1) safe kernel code from unsafe kernel code and (2) kernel code from user code. Evaluation shows that our system provides such isolation with very low performance overhead. Notably, the unikernel with our isolation exhibits only 0.6% slowdown on a set of macrobenchmarks.

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“…It fully applies Rust to the problem of isolation. Theseus [27] is an operating system written in Rust with a completely new system architecture. It enables better state management and fault recovery by defining components as cells with well-defined boundaries, etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

rOOM: A Rust-Based Linux Out of Memory Kernel Component

LI,

ZHANG,

et al. 2024

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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The Linux kernel has been applied in various securitysensitive fields, so ensuring its security is crucial. Vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel are usually caused by undefined behaviors of the C programming language, the most threatening of which are memory safety vulnerabilities. Both the software-based and hardware approaches to memory safety have disadvantages of poor performance, false positives, and poor compatibility. This paper explores the feasibility of using the safe programming language Rust to reconstruct a Linux kernel component and open-source the component's code. We leverage the Rust FFI mechanism to design a safe foreign interface layer to enable the reconstructed component to invoke other Linux functionalities, and then use Rust to reconstruct the component, during which we leverage Rust's type-safety and ownership mechanisms to improve its security, and finally export the C interface of the component to enable the invocation by the Linux kernel. The performance and memory overhead of the reconstructed component, referred to as "rOOM", were evaluated, revealing a performance overhead of 8.9% in kernel mode, 5% in user mode, 3% in real time, and a memory overhead of 0.06%. These results suggest that it is possible to develop key components of the Linux kernel using Rust in terms of functionality, performance, and memory overhead.

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Theseus

Cited by 11 publications

References 35 publications

Dynamic Linkers Are the Narrow Waist of Operating Systems

Dynamic Linkers Are the Narrow Waist of Operating Systems

Intra-unikernel isolation with Intel memory protection keys

rOOM: A Rust-Based Linux Out of Memory Kernel Component

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